Tag: archaeology

I can’t help it. I’m excited. I just registered to take a course (in the Fall) on gender and space in ancient Greek cities. After reading a lot about this but never actually “studying” it, I’m looking forward to going beyond the world of Greek vases and getting more into architecture/archaeology. I’m not really looking forward to reading the Odyssey for the 4th time. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Odyssey. But…I could wait another 4 years before going back to it. Enrolling in this course is part of my (at the moment) tentative plan to pursue the much-disputed, oft-coveted second Master’s degree. Or I might just take it for fun. Remind me of this when it’s getting dark at 4pm, I’m working full-time, and trying to write term papers and sit through 3 hour long classes again. Oh, and check out this tribute to rosy-fingered dawn.

Overall it was pretty weird and terrible, but the first few minutes were some of the most visually interesting I’ve seen in awhile, thanks to the quick cuts and linked imagery. When I say the movie was terrible, though, I mean it really was a disappointment. Not scary, and really there was nothing to the plot and the characters. Pauline Kael has an excellent (in my opinion) review of it, published in the New Yorker:Pauline Kael, The Current Cinema, “Labyrinths,” The New Yorker, December 24, 1973, p. 68.

Unfortunately I can’t give any quotes because I don’t have access to any electronic version, and the book I read it in is at home.

I finally uploaded the annotated bibliography I wrote for one of my classes. It’s on ancient (mostly archaic and classical) Greek art & archaeology. The assignment required us to find a certain number of resources in specific formats, so there’s a lot fewer web resources than I would include in a bibliography I was doing on my own. In fact, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to do a webliography of all the fun and creative online projects I’ve come across in this field. There’s the vast world of 3-D archaeological site modeling, and then there’s all sorts of online exhibitions, image collections, and digital libraries. I have many such sites bookmarked, but I’m sure they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Before I do this I’ll have to see if someone else has already done it.

I’m also working on posts about personal finance resources and an epic overview of my favorite sci-fi books from the past 10 years. (meaning ones I’ve read since 2000, not ones that have been published since then). I’m taking an online workshop on taxonomies and controlled vocabularies through Simmons College, so things might be dull around here until that’s over. I do plan to keep doing the visual LCSH roundup, though, because it’s entertaining.

I’m also ruminating on how to possibly create some simple yet helpful document on entrepreneurship that could be mailed to prisoners requesting information on the topic. A zine would be great, but the postage might overwhelm. It seems there is definitely a need for some easily distributable resource on this topic, at least in Pennsylvania.

I spent my stay-cation this past week trying to plow through all the articles and books I’ve amassed for my term paper on metadata for digital collections of archaeological materials. I use the vague word “materials” because one of the things I need to decide is whether I’m going to discuss things like datasets and 3D models and other fun things that might differentiate archaeology collections from art collections. I thought I was going to focus on descriptive metadata for images. It could be interesting to consider the differences between images of artifacts and “art” images. Usually if an artifact is important enough to get its own metadata, it’s probably moved into the realm of “art”, right? But what about all the photographs and other imagery generated during excavations? I need to figure out how people are currently putting this stuff online, how it fits in with the hard data, and whether there are any standard practices for describing these things, either as a unit or individually.

Everything I’ve read so far indicates that there’s a lack of standards (both for digital and physical collections) partly because there’s no consistency in the types of data collected by various archaeological projects, and because of differences in recording protocols, terms, measurement units, and language (Styliadis et al., 2009; Snow et al., 2006). The March 2009 issue of the Society for American Archaeology Archaeological Record has numerous articles devoted to the topic of international curation standards for archaeological collections. In her article, “Creating Digital Access to Archaeological Collections,” Julia A. King writes:

…while most archaeologists now use digital technologies in their work (for report production and image capture, for example) minimal consideration has been given to the long-term preservation and accessibility of the materials generated through this work (and, by accessibility, I don’t mean just the ability to ‘find’ objects or records within a repository. I also mean the ability to get relatively quick access to the data represented by these materials for research and interpretive purposes). The archaeological collections management literature, which has enjoyed considerable growth covering a wide range of topics in the last 20 years, has yet to consider the challenges of managing digital collections in the kind of detail afforded physical collections.

Earlier in the same issue, in an article entitled “From the Dust to the Disk”, David Bibby writes that each excavator collecting data in their own way “has lead to a myriad of variations…The key to successful data preservation is structured data collection. There has to be some common denominator, even if at only a very basic level — safeguards to ensure data integrity and security as well as some guarantee that future users of the excavation data will have an approximate knowledge of what to expect.” (17). He goes on to describe a recommended data structure designed to work with any sort of excavation data.

The most interesting articles I’ve read address the problem by proposing the use of concept ontologies and mapping to avoid requiring archaeologists/curators/anyone to use a single data model. The goal is “cyberinfrastructure”. Snow et al. advocate developing database mediation services that would encompass the various perspectives in archaeology, but would also “facilitate future efforts within the archaeological community to establish common, minimal standards for metadata descriptions of artifacts, sites, maps, and other academic resources”. Kintigh (2006) and Sugimoto, Felicetti, Perlingieri, & Hermon (2007) discuss semantic data integration for archaeology using an ontological approach.

I am just scratching the surface of this, and I wonder how much not being an IT person is going to impede me. I have many many things to investigate:

what sort of metadata is required to facilitate semantic data integration?

which thesauri and classification systems best support data interoperability, and are those systems being used on archaeological data?